1. Field of the Present Invention
The present invention is in the field of data processing systems, and more particularly in data processing systems that are extensively used to process transactions.
2. History of Related Art
Many data processing applications can be characterized as transaction processing applications. A conventional web server, for example, services transactions in the form of HTTP requests. The server detects and receives requests, takes appropriate action to respond to received requests, and returns some form of response to the requestor. Other transaction processing applications include data base servers and file servers.
In the context of data processing applications, monitoring the performance or efficiency of transaction processing applications is desirable to detect problems that may prevent transactions from being processed in a timely fashion. Typically, transaction monitoring is achieved by aggregating statistics for a large number of transactions and then averaging the statistics based on the collected data to determine, for example, the response time of a typical transaction. This form of monitoring is not suitable, however, in cases where the number of transactions “of interest” from a performance perspective is relatively small. In such cases, the relatively large number of uninteresting transactions may tend to skew the data such that any meaningful information regarding interesting transactions is obscured or lost. It would be desirable to implement a system and method for monitoring the performance of a transaction processing application in a way that enabled the user to focus on transactions of most interest, such as transactions that take a very long time to complete, even if the number of such transactions is relatively small.